Three Exiles, Slightly Broken
by RedPenn
Summary: The Homestuck exiles pull together to form a small dysfunctional family.


**-Sleep-**

She wakes up screaming, and AR sits with his arms around her shoulders until her shrieks dissolve into sobs and she buries her head in his chest. It's still so early in the morning that the air is frigid and the stars glimmer distantly in the darkness. The small, dark shape of WV is huddled like an animal by the ashes of the fire he fell asleep tending to. He sleeps like he's dead, and no amount of screaming ever wakes him.

Part of her is glad AR is there, and part of her wishes he wasn't; she never had nightmares like this when she was alone in the desert. She'd been empty, isolated, cushioned by the luxury that was not remembering. Now she has to crack her jaded shell just to recall how to interact with other people, and when her walls come down, the memories and nightmares creep in.

They can't leave the fire unlit; the desert nights are too cold and there's a very real danger of freezing to death in their sleep. AR steps over WV and stirs the ashes with his bare hands. There's still some warmth beneath them, and he throws more fuel on the fire - broken slats from the crates stacked high in the temple that looms darkly over them. He breathes on the dead coals until they glow and catch the wood alight.

He'll sit up with her, if she'd like. But she'd rather go back to sleep, if only for a few more hours. She isn't afraid of nightmares.

**-Eat-**

They eat whenever they're hungry, out of cardboard boxes and the strange, rusted, temple machines, and the tin cans that she rather smugly pries open with her Regisword, showing off a bit for the others. The three of them sit in the cool, shady interior of one of the powerless stations, cross-legged on the metal floor and reveling in the fact that they can eat with their fingers and no one but AR will care, and even he grudgingly admits that it isn't as if they have any silverware.

Mealtimes seem lighthearted on the surface, but she knows it's only because she's trying not to think about how very broken they are. AR is careful not to spill, she notes, and he doesn't toss his garbage carelessly aside like the rest of them, as if it the cities of this post-apocalyptic world weren't already filled with trash. She used to wonder what he did with those neat little piles of empty cans and cartons until one day she saw him carefully burying them in the sand, in a neat little landfill he'd marked off with caution tape.

He's never really been hungry, and neither has she. She was lucky enough to find the wheelbarrow, and smart enough to plan ahead and pay attention and learn where to find food in the broken husks that had once been cities. On cracked sidewalks half-buried in sand she learned to open cans, and she feasted on syrupy fruit and spicy soups and piled them by the armful into her little pushcart so that she'd always have something for later.

They have to keep an eye on WV when they eat, because if they don't he'll just keep eating and eating until he makes himself sick. She doesn't know if it's some kind of compulsion or if he's just been hungry for so long that he can't remember what it feels like to be full. She doesn't want to ask what he's been through; what he was doing on nights when she was curled up with a full stomach, licking syrup off her fingers.

**-Talk-**

She's bad at conversation. Her mind darts around too much, trying to look for hidden aggression, trying to turn everyone into an enemy. She holds too many taboos and gets angry at too many subjects, and she feels like the world is just waiting to insult her. It makes the others uncomfortable, the way she jumps at sudden movement and draws her sword on anyone and everyone who approaches from behind her. At night when they sit around the fire and talk, she's too busy glaring at the flickering shadows to contribute.

AR and WV talk about anything and everything, as if they've known each other their entire lives. They revel in what she would call "arguing" but what they assure her is "debating." They bicker about law and government, and how they're going to rebuild civilization. WV insists that his newly-constructed world will have a new set of laws, tailored to aid the common man, and AR goes on about how the law is something sacred and can't be changed, and they dissolve into heated shouting matches that always end with the two of them drafting out yet another constitution in the sand.

AR's eyes go fever-bright when he talks about the law, as if it's a religion and he's been filled with holy fire. It isn't insanity, she reminds herself, any more than that wheelbarrow full of old, rusting mailboxes is insanity. When you'd lost everything, you needed something to grasp on to.

**-Think-**

She'd grasped on to the mail, if only to have something to do that kept her mind and her legs moving. She remembers a time when she'd spend days on end scouring the desert for scraps of paper, gathering them in her wheelbarrow and delivering them at random to the corroded boxes still peppering the cities. It didn't matter which went where, because there were no addresses anymore, and it was only something to do. Except sometimes she thinks it was more than that, because when she was delivering letters she could almost pretend that she was back on Prospit and the world hadn't ended in blood and fire.

WV is building a city out of cans. He happily devotes hours to stacking them atop each other, empty and full, whole and dented, and he makes bridges and skyscrapers and sidewalks paved with pop-can tabs. The desert sunlight catches it and turns it to silver, and it is precise and beautiful in its minutia. She wonders if he was an artist before the Reckoning. Farmer, he says. He's never seen a city.

She honestly can't tell if AR is helping or humoring him, but every so often he'll join in and add streetlamps and spires made of gleaming ammunition, and they'll argue some more about their constitution and whether or not the main throughway needs a strip mall. She finds it amusing, like some ridiculous game the two of them are playing, until one day she makes some innocent comment about wanting one of the pillars of City Hall for dinner and finds herself cornered by an enraged WV who can't believe she'd tear apart his city just so she could have something to eat.

It takes all her self control not to draw her sword on him then and there, but after she's taken a few deep breaths and managed to calm down, she sees the haze in his eyes and realizes that the line between fantasy and reality doesn't exist for him anymore. He's grasped on to his city the way she grasped on to her mailboxes, but now he doesn't know how to let go and he's lost the ability to tell that it isn't real.

She feels sick inside, and even with that scowl on his face she wants to reach forward and hug him, but she's not good at touching people and so she just turns and runs. She hides out in the temple for a while, and by dinner he's forgotten all about it.

**-Love-**

Every night, unless it's her turn to watch the fire, she sleeps next to AR, curled up in the hollow of his arms to absorb as much of his body heat as possible. Sometimes, "not good at touching people" doesn't apply to him. Long after WV's fallen asleep, the two of them stay up and stare upward at the stars sparking in the blue-black sky.

Stars are new to her; they didn't exist in the empty blackness of the medium. She names constellations and he commits them to memory, until all she has to do is point at a cluster of stars and he can tell her what she's decided to call it. Silly names like "squiggly snake" and "giant spoon." Out here in the desert there is no smog, no city lights, and no clouds, and the stars go on forever, like a bottomless ocean filled with little glowing lights. AR ruins the magic a bit by wanting to count them all, and so far he's gotten to four thousand and thirteen. He hasn't even managed half the sky.

**-Live-**

The worst part, at the beginning, is being a Prospitian among two Dersites. She knows them, loves them, thinks of them as her only family in the world, and yet there are days when she can only see black and white - her pearly hand stark against ARs - and it makes her jumpier than usual and more prone to threatening them with her sword. They give her a wide berth when she's like this, even if they don't know why, and she finds herself wandering off to hide somewhere and cry.

She is the last Prospitian in the multiverse. Her home is fire and death and blood and wreckage and snow-white corpses lying in the streets, and the only two people left in the world look like Jack Noir. And she hates herself for thinking like that, and so she cries even harder and can't seem to stop, and when AR comes looking for her to ask her what's wrong, she throws her Regisword at him and doesn't even care when it almost impales his foot.

She's alone for a while, and then WV finds her. He sits next to her and gives her an awkward pat on the shoulder, and offers her the can she wanted from his city.

It's full of apricots. They sit side by side in silence for a while and eat it together.

When they're done he lectures her about all the trouble he and AR had to go through to renovate City Hall. She smiles slightly and wipes her eyes, and tells him they're all just cans.

He smiles back at her, and tells her they're all just people.


End file.
